[Mailman-Users] Translation (Localization) of mail addresses?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jim Ziobro writes:

 > Are there any plans to support changing of mail interface addresses for 
 > other languages?

No.  There won't be, and patches submitted will very likely be
rejected.

 > In MTA/Utils.py I find:
 >   ('admin', 'bounces', 'confirm', 'join', 'leave', 'owner', 'request', 
 > 'subscribe', 'unsubscribe'):
 >   Should the Italian mail extensions be something like:
 >          gestire rimbalzi confermare aderire partire proprietario 
 > richiesta sottoscrivi annulla?

No.  These aren't English words.  They're magic strings (like HTML
tags or programming keywords), which are embedded in many clients,
including personal and organizational web pages (with RFC 2368 mailto
URLs).  "request" is specified by RFC 2142.  The others are common
aliases for functions that are mostly also available via the -request
address.  -bounces is entirely Mailman-specific; neither you nor any
user should need to know about it unless things get really horked.

In fact, users should not need to know any of them.  The translations
you suggest can and should be in client user interfaces, not the wire
protocol.

 > In the future could someone unsubscribe from terrier at dogs.us or 
 > terrier at cane.it with mail to:
 >      terrier-unsubscribe at dogs.us
 > or
 >      terrier-annulla at cane.it

Mark has the final say, but I'd bet my house he's gonna say "no, not
in Mailman 2".

 > Yes, I can do it in the mail system interface now but will Mailman ever 
 > want control over those mail addresses?  Some of the mail addresses are 
 > listed in the help messages for example.

It's mostly not a Mailman issue.  It wouldn't be that hard for us to
do it (but such work won't be done on Mailman 2).  The PITA would be
all the complaints we get from users who send mail to
terrier-anulla at dogs.us or terrier-unsubscribe at cane-it.  (I would
oppose doing it on Mailman 3 as a waste of time and an attractive
nuisance.)

 > Right now the above list is hardwired in places outside of
 > Utils.py.  It would be cleaner if there was a documented way for me
 > to get the list of extensions.

The way the world is going these days, the only one of those addresses
that's likely to actually get used is -confirm (which is necessary
because it's used in the proof of mailbox ownership dialog).  Users
generally prefer to interact with the website, and admins like to
encourage that, because that gives them control over what the users
can actually do to interact with Mailman, unlike email where they can
(and do) insane stuff.

Steve